Accessible YouTube & HTML5 Video

YouTube is obviously a great site for video, but not for everyone as it contains various accessibility challenges, particularly keyboard access. The use of Flash itself to play the video can be problematic, not be mention requiring support of the Flash plugin. HTML5 is a pending solution (HTML5 video is available on YouTube as a “trial”), but in its infancy, HTML5 video has accessibility issues that still need to be resolved, as does HTML5 itself.

In the meantime, here are a few alternatives to the YouTube website which provide more accessible controls and a much cleaner interface.

I would like to bring an accessible video-player-framework to your attention. I saw the presentation at the A-Tag Vienna (accessibility day). It has been developed for the website of the city-government of Vienna (Austria) and has been released under the GNU General Public License. The framework includes subtitles, additional audio-track for descriptive audio, possibility to integrate sign language-video, toogle on/off for the text-description, youtube-videos, flash-video with HTML5 iPhone/iPad/iPod fallback.information (german only) and download: http://www.accessibility.at/practice/barrierefreies-video-player-framework